Cultural colors of emotion and character

Some colors represent different things in different parts of the world, while others are universal. For example, in movies, villains are almost always portrayed in black and passion is going to bring out the red. But what about death? American culture usually calls for black. Hindu calls for white. David McCandless and Always With Honor explore these differences.

13 Comments

I love the idea behind this visualization, but the execution falls short of being helpful in seeing patterns in the data. It attempts at aesthetics, rather than making a visualization that brings out the interesting things within the data. Any idea if the data has been made publicly available?

I’d like it if the numbered labels around the outside of the ring were replaced with the actual text of the legend. Seems like it wouldn’t take up too much more space, and moving my eyeballs back and forth from the legend to the ring makes my brain hurt. But it is very interesting.

i love the idea and the research behind. however the legend is not accurate enough. eg, “south american” is vague to say the least (i dont know if the author refers to pre-columbian). in the same fashion, “western/american” is a redundancy.

I gotta say that I echo some of the sentiment so far. Looks great. Interesting underlying information. But the presentation is, quite frankly, a clunker.

I say make the thing a rectangular grid and ditch the legend in favor of just putting the labels on the data. The slight amount you lose in prettiness will be more than made up for in actual usability. And, cover or no cover, shouldn’t that be the point?